Desmarées was a Swedish painter active in Germany. Initially a pupil of his uncle, Martin van Mytens II in Stockholm, he later became his assistant and collaborator. He left Sweden in 1724, travelling to Amsterdam and then to Nuremberg to continue his training. He studied briefly in Venice with Giovanni Battista Piazetta in 1725, returning to Bavaria in 1728. Two years later he was appointed as court painter to Elector Charles in Munich and here he was involved in the decoration of the Ancestral Gallery (Ahrengalerie) at Munich Residenz. From 1745-49 and 1753-54 he was in Bonn in the service of Prince-Bishop Clemens August of Cologne.

Clement Augustus was the fourth son of Maximilian Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria, and Princess Theresa Kunegunde of Poland. He was Bishop of Regensburg and Munster, Archbishop and Elector of Cologne and Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order. He is depicted wearing a breastplate and the white mantle of the Teutonic Order with its cross on his left shoulder; the gold cross of the Order on a red ribbon round his neck.

The painting must have been in the collection of Frederick, Prince of Wales, by 1747, as the Duchy of Cornwall accounts record a bill for ‘Cleaning and mending the Gilding where wanted of a large frame to the picture of the Elector of Cologne by Order of Mr Cure’. The painting was reframed in the 19th century into a dark stained papier mâché frame along with a number of other German portraits, presumably to hang as part of an ensemble.

A three-quarter-length portrait of the same sitter by Desmarées, dated c. 1745, is in the Stadtmuseum Bonn (SMB 1991/G051; one of three held by the museum). A miniature by Andreas Henry Groth, depicting the Elector with the cloak and cross of the Teutonic order, is in the Royal Collection (RCIN 421676).